Establishing and assessing adaptive parking prices in a city: Algorithms, software and examples

TL;DR

This paper introduces ParkSage, a set of algorithms and software for optimizing city parking prices to maintain desired occupancy levels and reduce search times, demonstrated through a case study in Bat Yam, Israel.

Contribution

The paper presents novel spatially-explicit algorithms and software for establishing adaptive parking prices based on different geographic zones within a city.

Findings

Pricing by street links achieves high availability and near-zero cruising.

Medium-sized zone pricing effectively eliminates cruising.

Software is freely available for municipal use.

Abstract

We propose ParkSage, a set of spatially-explicit algorithms for establishing parking prices that guarantee a predetermined occupancy rate over a city, and for evaluating the achieved reduction in parking search time. We apply ParkSage for establishing overnight parking prices that guarantee 85% occupation in the Israeli city of Bat Yam. Pricing by street links ensures high parking availability and close to zero cruising everywhere in the city, but is inconvenient for drivers. Establishing prices by the large and heterogeneous city quarters results in local mismatch between demand and supply, the emergence of areas with fully occupied on-street parking and a long search time for the drivers whose destinations are in these areas. We demonstrate that pricing by the medium sized Transportation Analysis Zones, which is easy enough for drivers to comprehend and abide by, is sufficient for eliminating cruising. The software for establishing and assessing performance parking prices is based on the standard municipal GIS layers of streets and parking lots and is available for free download from https://www.researchgame.net/profile/Nir_Fulman